VALLEYESQUE by Fernando A. Flores

back-to-back shifts as a bartender at a beloved queer dive bar and a baker at a notoriously conservative Christian bakery, and her love life has been nonexistent since the end of a rocky twoyear relationship. But new opportunities soon appear on both the romantic and employment fronts: A sharply dressed woman named Charley flirts with Amy while buying coffee and a croissant, and two strangers Amy befriends at her cousin’s wedding offer to pay her $250 to step in as a bridesmaid for their upcoming nuptials since one of their original bridesmaids is moving to Dubai. With very little ramp-up or to-do, Amy and Charley begin dating seriously; the much longer slow-burn is between Amy and her new bridesmaiding job, which puts her in the middle of the wedding industry at a time when neither she nor any of her friends can legally get married. Dumond’s deep affection for the queer communities that spring up in red states—and especially for the multigenerational mentorship that makes survival and joy possible—is evident, but uneven pacing and a tendency to tell rather than show keep the reader at arm’s length from the action.

A sweet but slightly underbaked debut that explores its protagonist’s personal growth more satisfyingly than its romance.

ALL THE THINGS WE DON’T TALK ABOUT

Feltman, Amy Grand Central Publishing (320 pp.) $28.00 | May 24, 2022 978-1-5387-0472-1

A mother’s sudden return forces the lives of a father and child into turmoil. Morgan Flowers, who’s nonbinary, is used to being their neurodivergent father Julian’s emotional caretaker. What Morgan isn’t used to is putting their own wants and needs first. Enter Sadie Gardner, a fellow scholarship student at Morgan’s elite private school, who, much to Morgan’s shock, finds Morgan desirable. Things seem to be going well for Morgan until their mother, Zoe, who struggles with addiction and had taken off years before, comes tearing back into their life like a tornado, showing up unexpectedly at their front door. Thus the careful equilibrium Morgan has worked so hard to maintain comes crashing down: “You need to leave right now, Dad repeated once Morgan rushed him inside. You need to leave right now, Dad repeated while Morgan unzipped his coat and untied his shoes and helped him upstairs and gathered the weighted blanket and laid him down on the bed.” On top of Zoe’s sudden return, Morgan also finds themselves dealing with a blossoming friendship with an internet stranger who thinks they are someone else, the lingering loss of Morgan’s grandmother, whose cardigan still sits on the back of a chair in the house, and a father whose desperate internal desire to love and protect Morgan is followed up with little action. While Feltman’s narrative is, at times, clouded by too much attention given to the lives of secondary and tertiary characters, the complex relationship between Morgan and Julian places this novel solidly in the category of worthwhile reads.

A multidimensional family drama.

VALLEYESQUE

Flores, Fernando A. MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (208 pp.) $16.00 paper | May 3, 2022 978-0-3746-0413-4

Bizarre short stories from a Texan with a punk-rock heart. Austin author Flores’ first two books, Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas (2018) and Tears of the Trufflepig (2019), have already made him something of a cult favorite among readers who appreciate his frequently funny, almost always bizarre punkrock sensibilities. His new collection is set in the same off-kilter world as his previous works, but it also expands on it. In “You Got It, Take It Away,” named after the legendary Tejano singer Johnny Canales’ catchphrase, a Mexican American man encounters his difficult, probably racist neighbor, who shows him a mysterious

piece of cloth that defies the laws of the natural world. When he asks about it later, the neighbor becomes belligerent, convinced the man had broken into his apartment. The story ends on a surprisingly sweet note—Flores doesn’t sacrifice compassion for the sake of weirdness. “The 29th of April” is grounded more firmly in reality—painfully so. The narrator chronicles the descent of a town into gang violence: “The reporters stopped coming when we started finding them dead,” the narrator reflects. The story is told mostly in one long paragraph, giving it an exhausting kind of urgency; it’s both beautiful and intensely heartbreaking. All the stories here are excellent, but the best is perhaps “Pheasants,” in which a coffee shop worker named Tito Papel encounters an angel stuffing their face with a discarded piece of birthday cake; Tito asks them to leave, but they keep coming back, and the two banter good-naturedly about language and theology. The cakeloving spirit denies they’re Tito’s guardian angel, but the ending suggests they might have been playing it coy. Flores’ prose is a delight throughout the book, and his love for the unearthly always feels natural, never self-conscious. One character reflects, “Strange stories had helped me give meaning to the painful moments of survival, and strange stories were the only things I could continue feeding into the machine.” Could that be Flores’ own manifesto? Whether it is or not, his own strange stories are some of the best to come along in quite a while. This is an accomplished book from an author determined to keep literature weird.

Tales from the Rio Grande Valley that are as beautiful as they are bizarre.

BOYS COME FIRST

Foley, Aaron Belt Publishing (386 pp.) $17.95 paper | May 31, 2022 978-1-953368-25-6

An often funny debut novel about three friends searching for love and themselves in a rapidly gentrifying Detroit. Dominick, Troy, and Remy, three Black gay men in Detroit, are at a key turning point in their lives. After having caught his boyfriend in bed with another man and gotten fired from his job on the same day, Dominick Gibson packed up his car, left Manhattan, and, as the book opens, is driving back to his mom’s house in Detroit. Dominick is unsure what’s next for him, but he feels the clock ticking: “Here he was now, thirty-three years old and with eight years with his ex, Justin, having led absolutely nowhere. Time was running out. Though when you’re Black, gay, and thirtysomething, time always feels like it’s running out.” Dominick reconnects with Troy Clements, his best friend, who’s a socially minded teacher at The Mahaffey School in a neighborhood primed for “redevelopment”—or, in other words, bulldozers. Like so many Detroit residents, Troy is unsure about his city’s future. As he tells Dominick, “My worry is that it won’t be a Black city anymore. That it’s not going to belong to us like it used to. White people have started moving here in droves. Every time you look up—Dan Gilbert! New restaurant! New this, new that! And my thing is, I’m looking at my kids at Mahaffey and their families, and I know they won’t be able to keep up when it hits.” The final member of the trio is Troy’s friend Remy Patton, a real estate agent who goes by “Mr. Detroit.” When Remy takes on a project that threatens Troy’s school, all three men have to decide where their loyalties lies. Foley’s novel paints a vivid picture of Detroit gentrification pushing African American residents out in favor of high-priced condos, bougie restaurants, and new, White residents. The novel also excels at showing the ups and downs of the dating scene in Detroit. Dominick, Troy, and Remy experience steamy hookups, genuine connections, awkward encounters with closeted White men from the suburbs, and even an attempted rape. Foley has created original, striking characters; unfortunately, alternating among all three points of view sacrifices some of the plot’s momentum. Each man goes through dramatic ups and downs, but the larger story gets lost along the way.

Sharp characters and a striking depiction of friendship within a story that never quite coheres.